Friday, October 06, 2006

The Suicide of the West

I just caught this. although it came out two weeks ago. Theodore Dalrymple has an outstanding review of three books in the Claremont Institute's online magazine. The books document the decadence, dhimmitude, and coming destruction of Europe at the hands of the muslim barbarians, whom the 20-hour-work-week Euro weenies import to perform their manual labor for them:

That Western Europe suffers from a state of general paralysis is a truth too universally acknowledged to require much reiteration. Slow growth and high unemployment; an aging and shrinking population; scientific and cultural irrelevance to the rest of the world; a large, unassimilated alien population much of which is hostile to the very countries into which it has immigrated—these are just a few of the problems that Western Europe not only fails to solve, but even properly to recognize.

While Europe Slept, Menace in Europe, and Londonistan all deal with the European disease (if such a metaphor may be allowed for shorthand purposes), from slightly different perspectives. Bruce Bawer, an American writer resident in Norway, deals mainly with the threat of Islamism in northwestern Europe; Melanie Phillips, a distinguished British journalist, treats the specific case of Islamism in what might be called its international nerve center, London; and Claire Berlinski, an American writer living in Paris and Istanbul, analyzes the general state of the European psyche. Read in conjunction, they are far from reassuring.

...Modern Europeans believe in very little, except in as comfortable and safe a life as possible. Indeed, health and safety have altogether replaced faith, hope, and charity as the cardinal desiderata. It is scarcely any wonder that, when faced by people who, quite mistakenly and with a combination of staggering ignorance and arrogance, believe themselves to be in possession of a truth that justifies almost any atrocity committed, if not by them, exactly, then by those whom they have indoctrinated, modern Western Europeans do not know how to react. They have either forgotten what it is to believe in anything, to such an extent that they cannot really believe that anyone else believes in anything, either; or their memories of belief are of belief in something so horrible—Communism, for example, or Nazism—that they no longer believe that they have the right to pass judgment on anything. This is not a strong position from which to fight people who, by their own admission, hate you and are bent upon your destruction, brought about preferably at your own expense. First, you can't take them seriously; second, you suspect they might in any case be right. European multiculturalism is self-hatred writ large—and in the meantime is an employment opportunity for cultural bureaucrats.

In short -- at least until some unprecendented catastrophe occurs in Europe that wakes up the population, we cannot rely on the Europeans to provide any relevant help in World War IV, the West's global war on jihad.

Meanwhile, this is the fate that awaits all of us who refuse to surrender to the islamonazis:

'Boy snatched off street, set alight and murdered for being white'

MURDERED schoolboy Kriss Donald pleaded: "I'm only 15. What did I do?" as he was beaten up and dragged into the back of a car by his abductors, a court heard yesterday.

He was forced face down into the back of a silver Mercedes, threatened with a knife and told there was a gun in the car as he was driven off after being snatched from the street "because he was white".

All three are on trial in Edinburgh, accused of abducting and killing Kriss by striking him with a knife or knives, then setting him on fire on 15 March, 2004.